[Corpora-List] Extended Deadline ROLC special issue on Computational Models of First Language Acquisition

[pcomp at hunter.cuny.edu]

**************** Extended deadline: December 15, 2009 
*****************

Computational Models of First Language Acquisition
Special Issue of Research on Language and Computation  

Call for Papers

The journal Research on Language and Computation invites submission of 
papers 
for a special issue on Computational Models of Language Acquisition.  

Computational Models of First Language Acquisition
Special Issue of Research on Language and Computation  

Editors

Alexander Clark, Department of Computer Science, Royal Holloway,  
University of London 

William Gregory Sakas, Hunter College and The Graduate Center,  
City University of New York

Important dates

Submission of full papers: December 15, 2009   
Notifications of decision: February 31, 2010   
Revised versions due: May 1, 2010   
Second review: July 1, 2010   
Final versions: September 1, 2010  
Publication: Late 2010  

Background

Language acquisition has for a long time stood as one of the most 
fundamental, 
beguiling, and surprisingly open questions of modern science.  Recent 
advances in 
natural language processing, statistical parsing and machine learning, 
together 
with the availability of large corpora of child directed speech and other 
corpora, 
make a wide range of computationally-oriented approaches to the study of 
this 
problem available. In this special issue, we will provide a forum for the full 
range 
of current approaches to this important field.  

Psychocomputational models of language acquisition are of particular 
interest in 
light of recent results in developmental psychology that suggest that very 
young 
infants are adept at detecting statistical patterns in an audible input stream. 
Though, how children might plausibly apply statistical 'machinery' to the 
task of 
grammar acquisition, with or without an innate language component, 
remains an 
open and important question. One effective line of investigation is to 
computationally model the acquisition process, through simulation, 
mathematically, the statistical analysis of corpora, etc., and determine 
interrelationships between a model and linguistic or psycholinguistic theory, 
and/or correlations between a model's performance and data from 
linguistic 
environments that children are   
exposed to.  

Topics

We aim to publish papers that describe state of the art techniques in 
computational models of language acquisition. These should be 
computationally 
explicit but not necessarily implemented and these could be evaluated 
empirically, theoretically or on the basis of a detailed case study.  
This special issue should provide an interdisciplinary forum where 
researchers in 
theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, natural language processing, 
grammatical 
inference, machine learning and cognitive science can present research on 
the 
computational modelling of first language acquisition.  

We welcome papers from any of the current models of linguistic theorising: 
standard and enriched context free models, Principles and Parameters 
models, 
Optimiality theory and reseachers working within the Minimalist Program, 
and 
other approaches.  

Topics include but are not limited to:

* Models that address the acquisition of word-order;
* Models that combine parsing and learning
* Formal learning-theoretic and grammar induction models that use 
   psychologically plausible models of the information available to the 
learner
* Comparative surveys that critique previously reported studies
*  Models that address learning bias in terms of innate linguistic knowledge  
   versus statistical regularity in the input
* Models that employ language modeling techniques from corpus linguistics
* Models that employ techniques from machine learning
* Models of language change and its effect on language acquisition or vice 
versa
* Models that employ statistical/probabilistic grammars
* Computational models that can be used to evaluate existing linguistic or  
   developmental theories (e.g., principles & parameters, optimality theory,  
   construction grammar, etc.)
* Empirical models that make use of child-directed corpora such as 
CHILDES,  
   or indeed adult corpora as contrasted with child-directed corpora

Instructions

Submissions should be made online using Springer's Editorial Manager 
System, 
available at  http://www.editorialmanager.com/rolc

Length
    12,000 words (approximately 30 pages) for a standard submission
    4,000 words (approximately 10 pages) for a brief report

Further information

Please contact Alexander Clark (alexc @ cs.rhul.ac.uk) or William Sakas 
(sakas at hunter.cuny.edu) with any further questions.

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